It's been fifteen years since Brian Keenan's return from Lebanon where he was held as a hostage by Islamic militants. Despite that, Brian, now a best-selling writer and journalist, is still regularly stopped in the street by well-wishers asking after his health as if he had only just returned. Living a life largely out of the spotlight he's making a rare public appearance this month at The Orange Birmingham Book Festival to discuss his new book Four Quarters of Light, a riveting and evocative travel book about Brian's journey with his family across Alaska. And while he's looking forward to talking about his work, the idea of being a celebrity per se is one he's not overly keen on. He says: "I do try to play it down as much as possible. Fame is its own kind of prison. And I've had enough of prisons. "A lot of people still think of me in terms of my experiences in Beirut. In some ways it feels like I'm a lepur carrying a ringing bell - my image as a hostage will follow me around wherever I go for the rest of my life." Despite his books standing alone as wonderfully written spiritual journeys, perhaps inevitably Brian's work does resonate with echoes of his time on his four-and-a-half-year 'holiday' as he calls it, particularly when it came to the almost mystical process of writing his novel Turlough. Brian explains: "When you spend a long time in a small dark place people come to visit you. Suddenly one day Turlough Carolan was in my head, I could hear him. It was so strange - the only things I knew about him were that he was a blind harp player who lived in Ireland about 300 years ago. But it was like his story was being whispered to me through the walls of the cell. I kidnapped this ghostly apparition and kept him in my cell with me during my long holiday and I thought 'when I get out of this place I will write this story'." But Brian found himself unable to write Carolan's story on his return to Ireland, and twice prepared to abandon the book. But two fortuitously timed letters - with an illegible signature and no return address - helped kickstart his writing, describing Carolan as a 'dreamwalker'. "I'd never heard the term before and paired with the frustration over the stalled book I threw the first letter away, dismissing it as from some woman from the outback of Alaska who got her kicks writing letters to strange men," Brian says. "But the coincidence of it, stayed with me. Why did it arrive while I was having so much difficulty writing the book? I walked about for about a week thinking about dreamwalkers - what did it mean?" The answer came in a second letter apparently from the same person. "The writer said a dreamwalker is someone who comes to you in your dreams and gives you something you need - often a kind of healing - along with something you have to pass on. "Something just clicked in my head. I thought if Turlough Carolan walked into my dreams when I was locked in a cell in Beirut, then I could do the same to him. It was like someone had struck a match, suddenly I could see how to write the story." Following the success of a travelogue written with former cellmate John McCarthy about trekking through the Andes, Brian's publishers then suggested he write another travel book. For Brian, who was first captivated by reading Jack London's Call of Wild aged nine, and had visited briefly on a lecture tour around nine years before, Alaska was the only choice. Having meticulously planned a six month itinerary for the trip, which Brian took with his wife and two young sons, everything changed as a result of another amazing twist of fate. Meeting Debra, the Alaskan woman who would be his guide for part of the journey, over a getting-to-know-you lunch, Brian had a sudden unexplainable knowledge that she had been the mystery letter writer from years before who had inadvertently given him the key to overcome his writer's block. "I said to her 'You wrote to me'. And she looked at me impassively with her gorgeous eyes and said 'You didn't write back'. "I don't believe in coincidence, only significant coincidence. And when I met Debra the blueprint of my book and the journey we were going to take had to change. The book I'd intended to write didn't happen. "I was called back to this place to take the journey irrespective of where I'd thought I was going. I thought if I don't do this I'll never have the chance again - although I was more terrified than curious! "There's only one way to write about a place. You can't pass through it, you've got to pass into it and that's what I did. Writing the book was like a meditation back to the place and the time and the people. I stopped taking notes after a while. I have a firm belief that the mind forgets nothing. If anything happens here I'm going to remember it anyway. If you take notes you end up writing about something other than what's happened to you. You get it second hand." Brian is now writing a memoir of his childhood in Belfast but after that he's not sure what he's going to do. He says: "I never plan anything more than two years in advance. One thing life has taught me is you never know what's going to happen." For now at least he's put travelling on the back burner though: "Alaska is a place suffocating in superlatives, but when I was in the Arctic I didn't enjoy it. I'm not a survivalist, and I'm at an age now where I like my home comforts!" * Four Quarters of Light by Brian Keenan is published in paperback this month, priced £7.99. Brian will be talking about his work as a writer at The Orange Birmingham Book Festival on Friday, October 7. For more info call 0121 303 2323 or visit www.birminghambookfestival.org. | 
